How can I watch Curzon OnDemand on my TV?

[Guest]

What are my options to do this? Gut feel says I'd navigate via my iMac to the Curzon OnDemand site and start the video streaming. Then ideally have an AppleTV connected to the TV. Stream between the iMac and Apple TV. Is it as easy as that or is the AppleTV inside an Apple 'walled garden' and so unable to do this?

Geriatric TV....SCART input...no HDMI. So realise probably need a black box to convert HDMI to SCART. That's not the issue...I can work that bit out !

Many thanks. When did it get so complicated? And me an ex-BBC engineer and IT techie

[Mobson7]

I have watched many films via Curzon on Demand directly onto my Mac p.c. which has a large screen (27")...I can't help you but just wanted to say that this is a great opportunity to watch indie films of past and present....when they first started this service it had only two or three films but the library has grown and grown....whether you become a member or not, there is a 15% discount, the films are good value and the watchable time period is generous. Currently offering a selection of films celebrating the career of iconic french actress Isabelle Huppert.....

[Resurrection Man]

Ah, that's good to know from someone who has used the service. On further investigation I think that if I upgrade to Mountain Lion (no mean feat given that I will have to partition my Mac to keep Snow Leopard running) then I can use AirPlay Mirroring to send what I see on my iMac down to an AppleTV plugged into the back of the TV. The Gods of WiFi permitting, of course.

What is the quality like? I just had a quick look at the free Berberian Q&A and it's very soft and grainy...I'm hoping that it is the source material!

[Dave2002]

On further investigation I think that if I upgrade to Mountain Lion (no mean feat given that I will have to partition my Mac to keep Snow Leopard running) then I can use AirPlay Mirroring to send what I see on my iMac down to an AppleTV plugged into the back of the TV.

Why do you need to keep Snow Leopard? Do you need Rosetta and that Classic stuff?
if not, then why not just migrate completely?

I've not gone for Mountain Lion yet, but I did convert one machine from SL to Lion a few days ago. Suggest if you try do it in the evening. The basic conversion takes around 30-45 mins. Then you get a working system, but a lot of software then needs to be upgraded, which will take perhaps another hour. Finally you'll find that the Spotlight search index has been wiped, so best to leave the machine on overnight to get it re-indexed.

I don't know whether you have to do all of this again to get to Moutain Lion, or if you can go directly.

I still can't get the hang of the reversed mouse direction in Lion. I should be able to reprogram myself, but if I've not done it next week I may switch back in System Preferences. The mail display layout also changes, and I found that I had to go back into Mail Preferences to put things back as I want them - as they were before - with one line for each email msg. Not sure how old or big your TV is, but you can get quite good TVs with HDMI from Tesco for around £100 if you don't want a wall filling display. However I don't know if your Mac has HDMI - the newer Mac Minis do.

I find that if I don't want to share viewing with others that the video quality on iMac displays is excellent, so you should be able to watch directly on your display without the need for extra connections.

[Resurrection Man]

Hi Dave and many thanks for taking the time to respond to this.

I have a copy of Microsoft Office that only runs under Rosetta and also a copy of Spark...which is a demon of an audio processing program. Not that I use either that often but I like to keep them in reserve. Having said that I know that I've not used Spark all year. And Pages makes a fair fist of the odd Word document that comes my way. So perhaps.....I do have a reasonably well performing MacPro G4 that is never used but as that has Snow Leopard and so will run those two suites then maybe that is an alternative.

However you highlight one main reason for not migrating ...namely the hassle in getting to grips with a new layout. Why muck about with the layout of Mail ? Unless there is a big button in Mail Preferences that says 'Use the old interface' then I object to having my time 'stolen'. Your comment about the reversed mouse direction worries me. Never heard about that.

And at the end of the day, looking at the new 'features' of both Lion and Mountain Lion I see, for me, no compelling reason to switch. I have no need to sync with other Apple devices. No need for Cloud. Social media sites don't exist in my world. I never got convinced by Spaces in SL or Encore and I probably miss out on some improvements but never seem to have the time to pursue them. I have a bought copy of Default Folder sitting there waiting for me to give it some time and effort. Supposed to be the bees knees.

My iMac is too old to have HDMI and our TV is even more elderly...always did prefer RGB as an input! The reason for wanting to watch Curzon was to augment what was available from Cinema Paradiso. But as Paradiso is still providing all our viewing needs, the move to Curzon is not pressing.

So project on hold.

[Dave2002]

RM

If you have a powerful enough Mac with enough spare space, you could also run Snow Leopard using virtualisation, and use VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox (free) within it running on Lion. You could also do things the other way round - use virtualisation to run Lion with SL as the base. Strictly I believe that Apple don't permit some of their OSs to be run using virtualisation, but I think it's possible, and you're unlikely to be sued.

OTOH, if your Mac is old, then it probably isn't worthwhile. The new ones are much faster and can do more. Trying to run newer systems on older machines is quite likely to run into problems. The new i5 and i7 machines are really good, and I know people who have maxed these out with extra memory (up to at least 8Gbytes) so that they can use virtualisation effectively.

When you know about the changes between Mac OS versions it's not too difficult to reset the most critical ones back to what you want/expect. The problem is finding out how to do this when you are on your own, and don't know what's going on. To change the direction of mouse movements in Lion, unselect the box within the Mouse preferences which suggests "Natural" direction of movement. I don't know what is more natural about that!

[Nick Armstrong]

I thought with excitement that an archive of Sir Clifford Curzon's filmed performances had been made available to the public.... Silly me, on this Radio 3 message board!

Seems not...

Anyhow, good to see some hardcore mac-sters here. You guys are more advanced than me... I never got to grips with partitioning, virtualisation. My main MacBook Pro is still on 10.6 Snow Leopard, and I have seen no need to upgrade (partly due to scare stories - also that fact that I often find that so-called 'advances' - e.g. recently with iPhoto - are in fact not as good as the earlier versions). Still got an old MBP on 10.5 and an iMac still on 10.4: all are fine for my purposes, which are presumably pretty modest.

Would I be able to do the Curzon thing on the 24" screen iMac on 10.4? I suspect not though...

[Ferretfancy]

Re mountain Lion on my iMac20. I have Snow Leopard at the moment, and enquired about upgrading, only to discover that the new system will not recognise my carefully compiled music catalogue which I have been adding to for years using an old Appleworks system. So, I would lose thousands of entries. Perhaps I should keep my iMac for word processing and printing and buy a laptop or an iPad, but why should I have to ?

Lack of true compatibility is the curse of digital. As another example, I recently tried to access Channel 4 OD on my new Samsung smart TV, which already has BBC iPlayer and ITV Player installed. I managed to download it from the Samsung browser, only to discover that I needed to install Flash, and failed to do so. I rang Samsung and was told that their system could not use Flash, although I can watch C4 OD quite happily on my iMac. Navigating the Samsung browser is incredibly clumsy using the TV remote, so I decided to get a remote keyboard which works OK except for the fact that I'm not used to its layout, and naturally there is no instruction manual.

As Kurt Vonnegut used to say --- " So it goes ! "